ICGA Journal - Volume 32, issue 1

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ISSN 1389-6911 (P)

ISSN
2468-2438 (E)

Impact Factor 2019: 0.500

The ICGA Journal provides an international forum for computer games researchers presenting new results on ongoing work. The editors invite contributors to submit papers on all aspects of research related to computers and games. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

(1) the current state of game-playing programs for classic and modern board and card games(2) the current state of virtual, casual and video games(3) new theoretical developments in game-related research, and (4) general scientific contributions produced by the study of games.

Also welcome is research on topics such as:
(5) social aspects of computer games
(6) cognitive research of how humans play games
(7) capture and analysis of game data, and
(8) issues related to networked games are invited to submit their contributions.

Abstract: This article has two purposes: a review on the problem of building a controller for the well-known video game Tetris, and a contribution on how to achieve the best performance. Key components of typical solutions include feature design and feature-weight optimization. We provide a list of all the features we could find in the literature and in implementations, and mention the methods that have been used for weight optimization. We also highlight the fact that performance measures for Tetris must be compared with great care, as (1) they have a rather large variance, and (2) subtle implementation choices can have…a significant effect on the resulting scores. An immediate interest of this review is illustrated. Straightforwardly gathering ideas from different works may lead to new ideas. We show how we built a controller that outperforms the previously known best controllers. Finally, we briefly discuss how this implementation allowed us to win the Tetris-domain prize of the 2008 Reinforcement Learning Competition.
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Abstract: The ultimate goal of our research is to make a computer model of the cognitive behaviour of human game players using Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind theory about human cognition. The first step for building such a model is to understand the most primitive building blocks of human cognition, namely those dealing with perception. In the two reproduction experiments given in this article, a number of hypotheses about the importance of perceptual features for recognition were investigated. These experiments were carried out using shogi (Japanese chess), but neither the hypotheses nor the experimental set-up is particularly shogi-specific, so…the results are expected to carry over to other games as well. The results of the experiments showed that knowledge in long-term memory is very important for perception and that perceptual features play only a minor role in recognition.
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Abstract: For playing the game of Tetris well, training a controller by the cross-entropy method seems to be a viable way (Szita and Lőrincz, 2006; Thiery and Scherrer, 2009). We consider this method to tune an evaluation-based one-piece controller as suggested by Szita and Lőrincz and we introduce some improvements. In this context, we discuss the influence of the noise, and we perform experiments with several sets of features such as those introduced by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis (1996), by Dellacherie (Fahey, 2003), and some original features. This approach leads to a controller that out-performs the previous known results. On the original…game of Tetris, we show that with probability 0:95 it achieves at least 910; 000 ± 5% lines per game on average. On a simplified version of Tetris considered by most research works, it achieves 35; 000; 000 ± 20% lines per game on average. We used this approach when we took part with the program BCTS in the 2008 Tetris domain Reinforcement Learning Competition and won the competition.
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